Mists of History
by Nomidzomai
Summary: Hoshi disappears from Enterprise after a bizarre anomaly attacks the ship. That's when a large portion of the galaxy starts to turn upsidedown. And yes, Virginia, there is femslash.
1. Chapter 1

"Bridge to Ensign Sato," the comm buzzed with Archer's voice in Hoshi's ear and startled her out of a very pleasant dream. Why was it always those that got interrupted? Sleepiness began to dissipate and profound irritation set in. She'd been enjoying herself far too much to deal with anything anyone on the bridge would have to say. She scrabbled around one-handed, hitting the appropriate button a little sooner than she had expected, in the middle of an inappropriate response, specifically: "Damn it to hell! Go fuck yourself, you sleep-disturbing bastard. Go ahead, sir."

"Say again, Hoshi?"

She had said it in Japanese, apparently, or perhaps in crude but passable Kreetassan, which was probably for the best. "Go ahead, sir." She was reasonably certain it was English this time, and that it sounded less irritated.

"We need you out here."

"Yes, sir." This was obviously going to be the extremely early start to a fabulous day, she thought.

"It sounds like a distress call," Hoshi was saying several minutes later. Awakened very early since Crewman Lewis hadn't been able to make heads or tails of the transmission, her brain was still coagulating. She made a mental note to ream Lewis out for failing to have her unique abilities and thereby costing her precious sleep. "I'll need a little time to make sure," was all she said out loud. Listening to the unfamiliar words, she went into a half-trance of sorts. Her mind worked efficiently and without prodding, which was good. This way, everything but her ears and her linguistic skills could go safely back to sleep. Sentence structures and possible derivations ticked through her head, relating this newest language to all the others in her considerable repetoire. "Hey, wait a minute! That _is_ Klingon! Granted, it's a dialect that should be dead..." Her brain was a computer, clicking over more information by the second. The recorded voice was definitely feminine, but very gravelly. It sounded Klingon enough.

"Hoshi?" Captain Archer looked bemused. "Klingons don't send distress calls, any more than Vulcans crack jokes. If that's what this is, it's not just the dialect that's unusual." T'Pol, sitting at her station with typical poise, did not even show that she had heard.

"It's not a distress call. It's a warning," Hoshi explained. "In a dead language, of sorts. And the placement of adverbials..." She thanked her lucky stars that a Klingon classical scholar had recently made edifying contributions to the Linguistics Database in exchange for Hoshi's help translating ancient Greek. Linguistics, let alone Classics, seemed to her an unlikely field for a Klingon, but then, what did she know?

"How did it get all the way out here, then?"

"My field of expertise falls somewhat short of determining that, sir."

"Well, at least tell me what it says?"

"I'll try sir, but this is a dead language, or rather dialect, at least it's supposed to be... that I'm hearing spoken for the first time." Taking a calming breath, Hoshi allowed herself to continue. "They've encountered... something... The upshot is that they lost a crewman, the engines failed, and a bunch of supplies disappeared. The 'something' could have been along the lines of 'spatial anomaly,' but I can't be positive and they shouldn't have had a word for that at the time Klingon was spoken in this form; It's roughly the equivalent of Latin. And I'm not even going try the ship's UT, it's been completely haywire since last night when Trip spilled..." she shut up, not wanting to incriminate him any further. Captain Archer seemed preoccupied enough that her slip didn't matter.

"Still not typical Klingon behavior. Set a course, Travis. We're going to look for survivors," Archer said, getting such a look of determination that not even T'Pol contradicted him immediately beyond a subtle shift of her eyebrows and a statement about the Vulcan Science Directorate hanging obviously on the tip of her tongue. Mayweather obeyed the order without comment.

Hoshi kept a subtle eye on T'Pol. She had observed the Vulcan closely for a long enough period of time that she knew when she was just bursting to say something. Finally, some minutes after they had begun to move again at warp 2.6, the it appeared she could no longer stand it, and said in a low voice, "Are you sure this is wise, captain? Whatever disabled the engines of those alleged Klingons could still be there. Not to mention the fact that the Vulcan Science Directorate..."

"Oh, please, T'Pol! We all know that the Vulcan Science directorate has its head up its..." Hoshi coughed loudly, not desiring to hear T'Pol's take on unnecessary vulgarity on the bridge, just as the ship shuddered and the flowing stars appeared to jerk erratically.

Suddenly worried, Archer pushed the comm button. "Trip, what's going on down there?" The sound of a mercifully small explosion greeted him, followed by the chief engineer's cursing and the unmistakable sound of a fire extinguisher.

Finally Trip responded. " Cap'n, I was just about to ask you the same thing. This may sound a bit crazy, sir, but equipment keeps disappearing, I thought we were gonna have to dump the..." another small explosion ended his sentence prematurely.

"Perhaps he spilled bourbon all on the warp core yesterday, too," Hoshi chuckled to herself.

"Drop out of warp immediately!" shouted the captain, but just at that moment, a ripple of distortion wracked the Enterprise. It seemed to buckle the confines of space as did the anomalies in the Delphic Expanse. And this one seemed to engulf Hoshi, obscuring her from view as sparks and smoke burst from her console. Even when the anomaly seemed to have cleared the ship, there was not a hair left of their translator.

T'Pol, in the Vulcan equivalent of cursing a blue streak, stated calmly, "This is not a desirable situation."


	2. Chapter 2

Blacking out had been a mercy; Hoshi felt as if she'd just been through a horrible transporter accident. When she came to, it was to the sight of a mostly unfamiliar greenish grey sky, and the sound of a vicious battle raging very close by. After obsessively making sure that all her limbs were attached, she raised her head to observe her surroundings. Strewn in her immediate vicinity were what looked like pieces of warp coils and other miscellania from engineering. She had no time to consider the significance of this revelation before a furious battle cry alerted her to the fact that she had to roll out of the way of an axe's downward swing. "Oh, holy shit!" she thought in several languages at once, thanking god for ukemi before her martial instinct fully took over. So few people knew she had anything of the sort. What they didn't know, however, was not likely to hurt them if they didn't attack her. After the unpleasantness that got her kicked out of Starfleet Academy, she had hidden her skill. Even in her training sessions with the MACOs, she had used only enough of her knowledge to avoid getting hurt with what had looked like remarkable natural talent, which was more than she could say for Lieutenant Reed. Captain Archer knew her before selecting her as his communications chief and knew all about her wild academy days. Indeed, he had witnessed some of them, but other than that, she had only spoken of it to Trip, in a hazy patch of memory that she was almost certain involved her being dead at some point. She dropped to one knee and rolled again, searching for anything like a weapon she was used to, for any opportunity to grab a sword, an axe, or hell, even a piece of debris that could possibly serve as a bludgeon or shield her from the onslaught. "Desist at once!" she snarled in Klingon, but he didn't desist. She was irked by the parts of herself that were still screaming at her to run and hide.

Evasion wasn't a skill cultivated by Klingons beyond the barest necessity; her attacker seemed quite surprised to find himself continually eluded rather than countered with brute force. And that gave her ideas. The curve of the double bladed axe cleaved into the soft ground where Hoshi had been kneeling only a split second before and the blade became lodged. She took advantage of the forced hesitation on the Klingon's part while he tugged at his weapon. A few deft maneuvers and she was in a position of enough advantage to allow her a few more words and to bring up her hands. "You coward! I'm unarmed!" Her assailant either didn't hear, didn't understand, didn't care, was too insulted not to attack her, or was too shocked to change his action in time. Whatever the reason, he left Hoshi no choice. He lunged, but found himself sent in a tight arc around where he had intended to go, deprived of his weapon, and lying on his back in a patch of bloody mud, with his right arm threatening to go out of commission in an extremely unpleasant fashion every time he tried to get up. And he certainly did try. It was all Hoshi could do to hold him back, and she was quickly beginning to slip.

"I said I'm unarmed!" she shouted. "You call yourself a warrior?" Her opponent merely growled, rage blinding him to his predicament and deafening him to her words. It was no use talking; she would have to finish him.

"I really hate doing this," Hoshi said in English, and struck him the coup de grace with surprising force. The engine parts were sinking into the mud, she saw as she looked away from the decapitated body. They could not avail her now, with no ship to put them in and no particular skill at engineering to begin with, and so she let them sink. Instead, she looked back to the body, and noted the ridged metal plate that was fitted to his forehead, polished to a brassy finish that caught the dim rays of the alien sun and flashed at her with pale yellow fire.

Hoshi didn't know where the impulse came from, but she pulled the mask off the corpse's erstwhile head after observing the way he had fastened its hold with sinews. She affixed the trophy of her kill to her own brow. This wasn't like her at all. Maybe something Klingon was in the air. The pinkish blood that had poured from the severed neck ran down from the edge of the mask, matting her fine hair and probably stinking it up something terrible. After a second of hesitation, she borrowed some of the corpse's foul-smelling furs to wear, wriggling quickly out of her Starfleet uniform and hiding it in the mud along with the engine parts. Better not to look too out of place, other than being quite short, about which she could do nothing.

The sounds of battle had moved off from her position by the time she was done robing and arming herself in what she hoped was a suitably Klingon fashion. She climbed to the top of a small rise to survey her surroundings. A morass of violence spread out below her, scores of fur-clad warriors who showed no mercy in their struggles. Hoshi couldn't help but wonder for which faction of this bloodbath she had inadvertently fought. She couldn't tell who was on whose side, if any one was allied with anyone else or whether it was just a random free-for-all. Something about the weaponry struck her. There were none of the bat'leths she had seen Klingons use in her time. The axe in her hand, while it made her feel more secure, did not make up for the fact that she did not know where... no, scratch that, where was fairly certain. The question was when she was. Not to mention other things, which her brain gladly pushed to the fore of her thoughts. "Who was he?" she said out loud, turning an uneasy eye back to the corpse, the head having rolled away a few meters. None of the other warriors below wore a mask such as she wore now, and didn't unusual numbers of shiny things usually mean "This person is important?" Hoshi began mentally conjugating the rarely used Vulcan verb meaning "to be completely and utterly fucked." It did not do much for her nerves.

"She is obviously dead."

"You're really not helping, T'Pol."

Archer was thoroughly worn out from pacing. Ever since Hoshi had disappeared, he had been faced with the slow disintegration of the crew's morale. After the internal sensors had detected nothing, Lieutenant Reed had sent out security teams all over the ship to look for even a trace of her, his lips becoming thinner and thinner around his grimace as report after report came back negative. Trip had thrown himself into his work, as though perhaps by fixing the engines he could fix everything else. Travis had gotten quiet, even more so than usual. Phlox had reported from sickbay that several of his animals were suffering extreme distress and, for that matter, so was he. Even T'Pol had permitted her eyebrows to carry on a long, frenetic conversation above her otherwise stoic visage, scanning the Vulcan database for incidents bearing any resemblance to this one. She also seemed compelled to give matter-of-fact voice to that which nobody else wanted to accept.

They had dealt with losses in the crew before, but none had hit quite this hard. After all, when the others had died, millions of humans had already perished due to the misinformation sown by the sphere-builders. This had come out of nowhere and taken Hoshi right off the bridge.

"It is illogical to assume otherwise."

T'Pol was probably right. But what the hell was he going to tell her parents? It was always hard to compose those messages, but doubly so when maintaining professional distance from a dead friend, and triply when the circumstances were unclear. He sank back into his chair with a deep sigh, wondering what Hoshi's own advice would be.

"Are you sure that is Molor? I was expecting him to be taller."

Hoshi's keen ears caught the whisper behind her even over the din of the raging battle below her perch on the ridge. For a moment, she stood frozen to the spot, listening.

"That is his crown," said a different whisper. "And his weapon, I'm certain, just as described. But I was expecting him to be taller too."

It felt to Hoshi like her face had completely drained itself of blood. "Qu'vatlh!" she swore, rather more loudly than she'd intended, and turned to look for the source of the voices. The two Klingons were not hard for her to spot. In fact, it would have been more difficult to miss them.

"I also expected a man!" muttered the first, becoming visibly more agitated as the linguist's voice carried.

"We were apparently mistaken," said the second, eyeing Hoshi with disbelief that seemed to border on suspicion of foul play, which seemed to be causing a slow-burning anger to build up, obvious even at this distance.

Hoshi decided it would be in her best interests to do something, but she was not sure what. "What's the worst thing that could happen?" she asked herself. Well, the worst that could happen was that she would be brutally killed, so perhaps that wasn't the best way to look at it. She was unlikely to get back to Enterprise at this point, so the best she could hope for was to survive her natural lifespan, although among Klingons, she thought, death might be preferable. The operative word being might. If she showed any confusion or weakness, she was far more likely to die right here and now. Although she wasn't sure quite why, her instincts guided her to heft the dead warrior's head in her left hand and shout "Looking for this?"


End file.
